


apples are golden, please have some blue

by ryter



Series: SBI characterization fics to cry about [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Aftermath, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brotherly Love, Brothers, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exile, Family Dynamics, Gen, Ghost Wilbur Soot, Grief/Mourning, I Made Myself Cry, I'm Bad At Tagging, Moving On, Post-Manberg-Pogtopia War on Dream Team SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Siblings, Sleepy Bois Inc as Family, War, jschlatt is tubbo's father
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28216617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryter/pseuds/ryter
Summary: Tommy's the loud one, but he's also the one that fixes his family. So, on the seventy-third day of exile, when he wakes up silent, he goes and finds his brothers.Or: there's a reason Tommy won't stop eating gapples.
Relationships: TommyInnit & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Wilbur Soot & Technoblade, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Series: SBI characterization fics to cry about [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2084016
Comments: 38
Kudos: 791
Collections: Completed stories I've read





	apples are golden, please have some blue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work based on the characters within the Dream SMP and not the content creators themselves.
> 
> also I literally made myself cry while writing this so here you go

When Tommy said his first words as a baby, a coherent “apple” amid his griping and babbling, Phil had swung him around in the air so high and had cheered so loudly that Techno had woken up from his nap. This is how Tommy hears the story—not from a father, but from a brother, over the glow of the campfire and under a starry night sky and sleeping bodies next to them in woollen bags.

Tommy starts to talk young and doesn’t stop. He babbles back at brooks and cheers during carnivals, and shouts back at strangers from across the street. He wakes up humming and goes to bed mumbling, whispering secrets to walls and stuffed animals. The jukebox in his room turns steadily on repeat, until the grooves of the disks are worn thin and shatter in his hands.

It takes Tommy seventy-three days of exile to wake up in Logstedshire with nothing to say.

#

 _Brother,_ Ghostbur whispers, voice high and reedy. Tommy has already started to forget how low Wilbur’s voice used to be, when he plucked the old guitar strings and sang along. _Have some blue,_ Ghostbur says, and his voice sounds more like the strings than the melodies Tommy still knows by heart.

Tommy wants to scream. His own voice is still rough after disuse, hoarse from neglect, cracking mid-words because of damned growth spirts and emotions lingering too close under his skin. He wants to scream, because at least his voice is how he remembers it being, even when he hates it more and more with each passing day.

 _I don’t want blue,_ he says underneath Ghostbur’s laughing, _I don’t want you, I don’t want us to be lads on tour, I want to go home, I want my bench, I want my discs, I want my fucking brother back—_

He stays silent. Ghostbur keeps singing, happy and carefree in death, in a way he never was during life.

#

He remakes a tent. _Tnret,_ he insists, smile frozen to his face, and keeps it white. _This is a campsite,_ he tells his dead brother on the first day in exile, and does not think of a time where campsites used to be a family event.

He does wonder, however, when he’s finally alone with no one to shut his thoughts up, if Ghostbur remembered any of the camping trips they had once gone on. He’ll never ask, but it’s the kind of thought that stays.

#

Here’s what they don’t tell you about brothers.

Techno will always be the oldest brother. _Born two minutes too early_ , he will think to himself, but he takes those two minutes like a crown and keeps it with him. He is the one Wilbur and Tommy go to, when they are in trouble.

Phil is their father, and he is a good father, but he has long since learned how to stifle the fire within himself and avoid rage. Phil is the carrot, and Techno is the stick, and it is a cruel world where the stick is more trusted than the carrot could ever be. _You don’t want to be a disappointment._ Techno might fight with the voices his entire life, but that means when Wilbur or Tommy need help, they know Techno will be honest with them.

Sometimes Techno goes days without thinking of his brothers. This isn’t a bad thing—he has so much weighing on him, Atlas instead of Theseus, that he forgets to eat or to sleep. But even in these moments, he is an older brother, and he keeps a chest filled with food and spare blankets in his house stocked at all times.

Wilbur will always be the middle brother. Techno is the rising star, and Tommy is the flame—but Wilbur is the ice. He was the one who cooked the most at home, sang his own songs on imaginary guitar chords, patched his brothers up after a fight. Tommy will go to Techno bruised and bloody, but he will come to Wilbur late at night.

Here’s the thing about that—Wilbur will always be the middle brother, and that takes just as much as it gives. He isn’t as strong as Techno or as well-loved as Tommy, and that means the spotlight is something he tears himself apart to get. No podium is ever big enough, because even as President, he is Techno’s little brother. Part of him hurts at that, the part that takes over his head and spits and howls at the moon, but it’s true. Just like he will always be Tommy’s big brother.

Tommy is the glue that keeps the family together. It was always Wilbur and Techno, or maybe Techno and Wilbur, but Tommy is what keeps them together as they grow older. Loud doesn’t mean stupid, and Tommy was the one who fought with his words and not his fists, who was as calculating as Techno but as clever as Wilbur. The best of both of them as well as the worst.

But Tommy is the youngest, and that means his voice will be the quietest, no matter how loud he yells. _You’re never going to be President,_ Wilbur tells him once, and Tommy believes it even as he climbs up to the podium. Deep down, he knows that sentence was one of the reasons Wilbur pressed the button—he couldn’t handle Tommy giving the Presidency away, as if he was unworthy to lead, as if Wilbur said the truth and not a desperate lie to keep control.

Tommy will always have two older brothers, and that will never be enough.

#

On the seventy-second night, Tommy dreams. It’s the flicker of lime green and enchanted armour, a crossbow worth more than coins could pay, a bone-white mask hiding wicked smiles.

 _You needed to be watched,_ Dream croons to him, pressing the mouth of a glass bottle to his lips. Tommy drinks and drinks but the bottle is never empty, even as he gets weaker and weaker, lungs gasping for air. _You never followed orders anyway. Do you want to be a hero, Tommy?_

It’s the last line that makes Tommy snap awake, his brother’s words echoing in the wrong voice, silent gasps out in the early morning air. It’s what makes him move away, walking on unsteady and bloody legs, to the only family he can still claim as truly his own.

#

“Did I make Wilbur unhappy?” he asks Techno one day, mid-jokes and searching for dogs. He expects a bantering answer back, an _of course you did, what did you expect_ , something he’s already preparing his gut for. He doesn’t expect Techno to freeze in place, almost running into a tree as he stares at Tommy intently.

“What do you mean?” Techno asks, and Tommy’s face burns red.

“I mean, at least Ghostbur is happy now,” he mumbles instead of an answer _,_ but Techno hears it anyway. He’s always been the smartest one, the older brother, the one Tommy looked up to as much as he vilified him, the one Wilbur loved most.

Tommy doesn’t realize how tight his chest has gotten before Techno takes a step forward, boots crunching in the snow as he raises an arm to Tommy’s shoulder. Techno is even Tommy’s favourite—but Tommy chose Wilbur, and look how well that turned out for him.

“You never gave Wilbur anything but happiness,” Techno says quietly, and he’s serious in a way Tommy hasn’t heard in years. “We all put too much on him, but he put too much on himself, and that’s what broke him.”

“But we should have helped him,” Tommy protests, the cold (and just the cold) making him shake in the snow. “We could have stopped him, right? What if—what if we were really the bad guys?”

“Tommy.” Techno’s voice is solid iron, cutting through thoughts as if they were mobs, teeth flashing in the light. “Even in his worst days, you were probably the only reason I saw him really smile. I never—I could never make him smile in the way you did.”

“Dad could.”

Techno swallows hard, hand dropping from Tommy’s shoulder to the sword on his belt. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Dad could.”

They go home with a dead brother and two dogs, and that will have to be enough.

#

 _Tommy,_ Ghostbur whispers at night, floating above the bed in Tommy’s new house, the one right next to Techno’s and away from the rest of the world. Tommy’s chest rises and falls in deep, even breaths.

 _Toms, I’m sorry._ There’s blue in Ghostbur’s hands, too much blue, and he’ll never tell a soul how blue isn’t the same to him anymore. There are flashes of blue meaning something important, as potent as the sky. Tommy’s eyes, and maybe Phil’s eyes as well, how he used to toss it away with a curve in his lips to still-unfamiliar faces. But now, blue weighs him down, makes him walk instead of fly.

He tries to throw his blue away, but it always comes back. It’s in the bittersweet love he feels in his ribs, or maybe something underneath his chest, when Tommy takes the blue with a frozen smile. Techno has a chest, hidden in a place not even Dream could get to, filled with stacks of it. Phil has a single piece he keeps in an item frame, as if it were a report card or a finger painting. Songs float through his head like river streams.

 _Toms,_ he says again instead, blue spilling out from his fingertips. _Tommy, let’s go home,_ and he isn’t sure if he means L’Manburg or Logstedshire or La Jolla, but it’s some word on the tip of his tongue. A part of his old name he cannot say. El, el, el. _Tommy, I’m so lost without you, love you so much, let’s go—_

Tommy sleeps on, dead to the world, dreaming of a time when he had two older brothers and a father next to him under the same sky.

#

They talk about family, once, him and Tubbo. Sitting on their bench, listening to music, chatting about everything and nothing and all the things they could fit in between. Tubbo had loved Phil, but had never crossed that line. It was always _Mister Phil_ , no matter how many times Phil told him otherwise.

 _I don’t know my real father,_ Tubbo once says, and Tommy carefully does not look at the horns peeking out of messy hair. Sometimes, he wondered how drunk Schlatt had to be not to notice the similarity, the same eye shape if not the same colour, the sharp points sticking out behind their ears.

But Tommy was loud, not an idiot, and this was something he kept to himself.

_(When Tubbo finally pushes him away, asks Dream to escort Tommy off the kingdom they had built together, Tommy couldn’t help but notice the familiar horns. He never once considers that maybe Schlatt stayed drunk to avoid noticing.)_

#

 _Have some steak,_ Techno will say gruffly, tossing the slabs of well-cooked meat onto the table and turning away without a care in the world. Tommy sinks his teeth into golden apples, remembering white tents and starry skies, knowing Techno is still watching out of the corner of his eyes and that neither of them will ever say anything about it.

#

Here’s a secret. Wilbur was always most afraid of forgetting things. Once he had Fundy, that fear magnified. He kept his promises written down, his nightmares carefully recorded. He knew each block of L’Manburg, mapped out and labelled, lingering in his head. He kept track of birthdays and well-wishes and betrayals, chanted names in the night when he couldn’t sleep.

Ghostbur only remembers the blue moments, and that is a punishment as much as it is a boon.

Here’s another secret. If Tommy had taken that extra step, he wouldn’t have come back. No one really knows how the ghosts work, or how long they’d be around for, but this is true—Tommy was always most afraid of being forgotten.

Alright, then. One last, terrible secret, so hidden that Techno doesn't even have the words for it. There are dictionaries in his head and textbooks on his walls, but there is no explanation for this emotion, not even in the early hours between dusk and dawn. Techno wouldn't have become a ghost, either—he lived his hell out for seventy-three days, in which he was a brother to none.

#

In the end, it’s Tommy who takes the first step. “Let’s go camping,” he says.

“Camping?” Techno repeats.

“We used to go all the time.” Tommy is grinning, cobblestone in his hands as he looks at his new tower. “Why not? When all this is done?”

 _Could I come?_ It’s not snowing, for once, and Ghostbur sits on a chair Techno dragged out for him and watches them avidly. His hair still lies lank over his eyes, the way it stayed ever since Fundy used to tug it down as a pup. _Am I invited?_

“All four of us,” Tommy insists. “That’s a thing, right? Remaking traditions?”

 _You used to camp a lot,_ Ghostbur agrees. He either doesn’t notice how quiet Techno and Tommy get at this, or he decides not to notice. _I remember—Wilbur used to stay up all night to listen to you talk. He didn’t want to talk, sometimes, just to listen._

There were only two ways this would end. In one, Tommy remembers the curling horns in Tubbo’s hair instead of Dream’s words and takes that extra step. Those horns grow and grow until Tubbo can’t see beyond his own eyes, pointing inwards as he screams at a wooden pillar. L’Manburg grows as well, until there’s nothing real left of it. In this ending, Phil mourns all three of his sons.

In the other, Tommy pushes his hair out of his face, sweaty underneath Techno’s spare helmet. His time alone hasn’t lessened his voice, hasn’t made it sharper or colder or less likely to speak. Tommy has talked since he said his first word, and no shield exists that could stop his voice, but Wilbur is still dead.

It’s the most hurtful point in either timeline. Wilbur is still dead, never meant to survive L’Manburg, and Ghostbur is scared of being alive again. _Selfish,_ they all think, but who wouldn’t be? Wilbur is dead, but Ghostbur is at least happy, or something as close to it as any version of Wilbur could ever get.

In this ending, Techno clears his throat.

“I should tell Dad,” Techno says quietly. “Invite him.” There’s a pause. “Your tower is so fucking ugly, Tommy—”

“You _bitch,_ I’ll stab you—”

So, this is it, in the end of all things. There might be more than this—a city they reclaim, dogs they name, friends that grew a little taller and a little softer in absence. A father coming back with tents and sleeping bags in his pack for sons that no longer sleep. But for us, this is where it ends—three brothers, golden apples, and blue skies.

In the end, this is enough.


End file.
